Canto One

The Eternal Day:
The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation

A marvellous sun looked down from ecstasy’s skies

On worlds of deathless bliss, perfection’s home,

Magical unfoldings of the Eternal’s smile

Capturing his secret heart-beats of delight.

God’s everlasting day surrounded her,

Domains appeared of sempiternal light

Invading all Nature with the Absolute’s joy.

Her body quivered with eternity’s touch,

Her soul stood close to the founts of the infinite.

Infinity’s finite fronts she lived in, new

For ever to an everliving sight.

Eternity multiplied its vast self-look

Translating its endless mightiness and joy

Into delight souls playing with Time could share

In grandeurs ever new-born from the unknown depths,

In powers that leaped immortal from unknown heights,

In passionate heart-beats of an undying love,

In scenes of a sweetness that can never fade.

Immortal to the rapturous heart and eyes,

In serene arches of translucent calm

From Wonder’s dream-vasts cloudless skies slid down

An abyss of sapphire; sunlight visited eyes

Which suffered without pain the absolute ray

And saw immortal clarities of form.

Twilight and mist were exiles from that air,

Night was impossible to such radiant heavens.

Firm in the bosom of immensity

Spiritual breadths were seen, sublimely born

From a still beauty of creative joy;

Embodied thoughts to sweet dimensions held

To please some carelessness of divine peace,

Answered the deep demand of an infinite sense

And its need of forms to house its bodiless thrill.

A march of universal powers in Time,

The harmonic order of self’s vastitudes

In cyclic symmetries and metric planes

Harboured a cosmic rapture’s revelry,

An endless figuring of the spirit in things

Planned by the artist who has dreamed the worlds;

Of all the beauty and the marvel here,

Of all Time’s intricate variety

Eternity was the substance and the source;

Not from a plastic mist of Matter made,

They offered the suggestion of their depths

And opened the great series of their powers.

Arisen beneath a triple mystic heaven

The seven immortal earths were seen, sublime:

Homes of the blest released from death and sleep

Where grief can never come nor any pang

Arriving from self-lost and seeking worlds

Alter Heaven-nature’s changeless quietude

And mighty posture of eternal calm,

Its pose of ecstasy immutable.

Plains lay that seemed the expanse of God’s wide sleep,

Thought’s wings climbed up towards heaven’s vast repose

Lost in blue deeps of immortality.

A changed earth-nature felt the breath of peace.

Air seemed an ocean of felicity

Or the couch of the unknown spiritual rest,

A vast quiescence swallowing up all sound

Into a voicelessness of utter bliss;

Even Matter brought a close spiritual touch,

All thrilled with the immanence of one divine.

The lowest of these earths was still a heaven

Translating into the splendour of things divine

The beauty and brightness of terrestrial scenes.

Eternal mountains ridge on gleaming ridge

Whose lines were graved as on a sapphire plate

And etched the borders of heaven’s lustrous noon

Climbed like piled temple stairs and from their heads

Of topless meditation heard below

The approach of a blue pilgrim multitude

And listened to a great arriving voice

Of the wide travel hymn of timeless seas.

A chanting crowd from mountain bosoms slipped

Past branches fragrant with a sigh of flowers

Hurrying through sweetnesses with revel leaps;

The murmurous rivers of felicity

Divinely rippled honey-voiced desires,

Mingling their sister eddies of delight,

Then, widening to a pace of calm-lipped muse,

Down many-glimmered estuaries of dream

Went whispering into lakes of liquid peace.

On a brink held of senseless ecstasy

And guarding an eternal poise of thought

Sat sculptured souls dreaming by rivers of sound

In changeless attitudes of marble bliss.

Around her lived the children of God’s day

In an unspeakable felicity,

A happiness never lost, the immortal’s ease,

A glad eternity’s blissful multitude.

Around, the deathless nations moved and spoke,

Souls of a luminous celestial joy,

Faces of stark beauty, limbs of the moulded Ray;

In cities cut like gems of conscious stone

And wonderful pastures and on gleaming coasts

Bright forms were seen, eternity’s luminous tribes.

Above her rhythming godheads whirled the spheres,

Rapt mobile fixities here blindly sought

By the huge erring orbits of our stars.

Ecstatic voices smote at hearing’s chords,

Each movement found a music all its own;

Songs thrilled of birds upon unfading boughs

The colours of whose plumage had been caught

From the rainbow of imagination’s wings.

Immortal fragrance packed the quivering breeze.

In groves that seemed moved bosoms and trembling depths

The million children of the undying spring

Bloomed, pure unnumbered stars of hued delight

Nestling for shelter in their emerald sky:

Faery flower-masses looked with laughing eyes.

A dancing chaos, an iridescent sea

Eternised to Heaven’s ever-wakeful sight

The crowding petal-glow of marvel’s tints

Which float across the curtained lids of dream.

Immortal harmonies filled her listening ear;

A great spontaneous utterance of the heights

On Titan wings of rhythmic grandeur borne

Poured from some deep spiritual heart of sound,

Strains trembling with the secrets of the gods.

A spirit wandered happily in the wind,

A spirit brooded in the leaf and stone;

The voices of thought-conscious instruments

Along a living verge of silence strayed,

And from some deep, a wordless tongue of things

Unfathomed, inexpressible, chantings rose

Translating into a voice the Unknown.

A climber on the invisible stair of sound,

Music not with these few and striving steps

Aspired that wander upon transient strings,

But changed its ever new uncounted notes

In a passion of unforeseeing discovery,

And kept its old unforgotten ecstasies

A growing treasure in the mystic heart.

A consciousness that yearned through every cry

Of unexplored attraction and desire,

It found and searched again the unsatisfied deeps

Hunting as if in some deep secret heart

To find some lost or missed felicity.

In those far-lapsing symphonies she could hear,

Breaking through enchantments of the ravished sense,

The lyric voyage of a divine soul

Mid spume and laughter tempting with its prow

The charm of innocent Circean isles,

Adventures without danger beautiful

In lands where siren Wonder sings its lures

From rhythmic rocks in ever-foaming seas.

In the harmony of an original sight

Delivered from our limiting ray of thought,

And the reluctance of our blinded hearts

To embrace the Godhead in whatever guise,

She saw all Nature marvellous without fault.

Invaded by beauty’s universal revel

Her being’s fibre reached out vibrating

And claimed deep union with its outer selves,

And on the heart’s chords made pure to seize all tones

Heaven’s subtleties of touch unwearying forced

More vivid raptures than earth’s life can bear.

What would be suffering here, was fiery bliss.

All here but passionate hint and mystic shade

Divined by the inner prophet who perceives

The spirit of delight in sensuous things,

Turned to more sweetness than can now be dreamed.

The mighty signs of which earth fears the stress,

Trembling because she cannot understand,

And must keep obscure in forms strange and sublime,

Were here the first lexicon of an infinite mind

Translating the language of eternal bliss.

Here rapture was a common incident;

The lovelinesses of whose captured thrill

Our human pleasure is a fallen thread,

Lay, symbol shapes, a careless ornament,

Sewn on the rich brocade of Godhead’s dress.

Things fashioned were the imaged homes where mind

Arrived to fathom a deep physical joy;

The heart was a torch lit from infinity,

The limbs were trembling densities of soul.

These were the first domains, the outer courts

Immense but least in range and least in price,

The slightest ecstasies of the undying gods.

Higher her swing of vision swept and knew,

Admitted through large sapphire opening gates

Into the wideness of a light beyond,

These were but sumptuous decorated doors

To worlds nobler, more felicitously fair.

Endless aspired the climbing of those heavens;

Realm upon realm received her soaring view.

Then on what seemed one crown of the ascent

Where finite and the infinite are one,

Immune she beheld the strong immortals’ seats

Who live for a celestial joy and rule,

The middle regions of the unfading Ray.

Great forms of deities sat in deathless tiers,

Eyes of an unborn gaze towards her leaned

Through a transparency of crystal fire.

In the beauty of bodies wrought from rapture’s lines,

Shapes of entrancing sweetness spilling bliss,

Feet glimmering upon the sunstone courts of mind,

Heaven’s cupbearers bore round the Eternal’s wine.

A tangle of bright bodies, of moved souls

Tracing the close and intertwined delight,

The harmonious tread of lives for ever joined

In the passionate oneness of a mystic joy

As if sunbeams made living and divine,

The golden-bosomed Apsara goddesses,

In groves flooded from an argent disk of bliss

That floated through a luminous sapphire dream,

In a cloud of raiment lit with golden limbs

And gleaming footfalls treading faery swards,

Virgin motions of bacchant innocences

Who know their riot for a dance of God,

Whirled linked in moonlit revels of the heart.

Impeccable artists of unerring forms,

Magician builders of sound and rhythmic words,

Wind-haired Gandharvas chanted to the ear

The odes that shape the universal thought,

The lines that tear the veil from Deity’s face,

The rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom’s sea.

Immortal figures and illumined brows,

Our great forefathers in those splendours moved;

Termless in power and satisfied of light,

They enjoyed the sense of all for which we strive.

High seers, moved poets saw the eternal thoughts

That, travellers from on high, arrive to us

Deformed by our search, tricked by costuming mind,

Like gods disfigured by the pangs of birth,

Seized the great words which now are frail sounds caught

By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue.

The strong who stumble and sin were calm proud gods.

There lightning-filled with glory and with flame,

Melting in waves of sympathy and sight,

Smitten like a lyre that throbs to others’ bliss,

Drawn by the cords of ecstasies unknown,

Her human nature faint with heaven’s delight,

She beheld the clasp to earth denied and bore

The imperishable eyes of veilless love.

More climbed above, level to level reached,

Beyond what tongue can utter or mind dream:

Worlds of an infinite reach crowned Nature’s stir.

There was a greater tranquil sweetness there,

A subtler and profounder ether’s field

And mightier scheme than heavenliest sense can give.

There breath carried a stream of seeing mind,

Form was a tenuous raiment of the soul:

Colour was a visible tone of ecstasy;

Shapes seen half immaterial by the gaze

And yet voluptuously palpable

Made sensible to touch the indwelling spirit.

The high perfected sense illumined lived

A happy vassal of the inner ray,

Each feeling was the Eternal’s mighty child

And every thought was a sweet burning god.

Air was a luminous feeling, sound a voice,

Sunlight the soul’s vision and moonlight its dream.

On a wide living base of wordless calm

All was a potent and a lucid joy.

Into those heights her spirit went floating up

Like an upsoaring bird who mounts unseen

Voicing to the ascent his throbbing heart

Of melody till a pause of closing wings

Comes quivering in his last contented cry

And he is silent with his soul discharged,

Delivered of his heart’s burden of delight.

Experience mounted on joy’s coloured breast

To inaccessible spheres in spiral flight.

There Time dwelt with eternity as one;

Immense felicity joined rapt repose.

As one drowned in a sea of splendour and bliss,

Mute in the maze of these surprising worlds,

Turning she saw their living knot and source,

Key to their charm and fount of their delight,

And knew him for the same who snares our lives

Captured in his terrifying pitiless net,

And makes the universe his prison camp

And makes in his immense and vacant vasts

The labour of the stars a circuit vain

And death the end of every human road

And grief and pain the wages of man’s toil.

One whom her soul had faced as Death and Night

A sum of all sweetness gathered into his limbs

And blinded her heart to the beauty of the suns.

Transfigured was the formidable shape.

His darkness and his sad destroying might

Abolishing for ever and disclosing

The mystery of his high and violent deeds,

A secret splendour rose revealed to sight

Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.

Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face.

The vague infinity was slain whose gloom

Had outlined from the terrible unknown

The obscure disastrous figure of a god,

Fled was the error that arms the hands of grief,

And lighted the ignorant gulf whose hollow deeps

Had given to nothingness a dreadful voice.

As when before the eye that wakes in sleep

Is opened the sombre binding of a book,

Illumined letterings are seen which kept

A golden blaze of thought inscribed within,

A marvellous form responded to her gaze

Whose sweetness justified life’s blindest pain;

All Nature’s struggle was its easy price,

The universe and its agony seemed worth while.

As if the choric calyx of a flower

Aerial, visible on music’s waves,

A lotus of light-petalled ecstasy

Took shape out of the tremulous heart of things.

There was no more the torment under the stars,

The evil sheltered behind Nature’s mask;

There was no more the dark pretence of hate,

The cruel rictus on Love’s altered face.

Hate was the grip of a dreadful amour’s strife;

A ruthless love intent only to possess

Has here replaced the sweet original god.

Forgetting the Will-to-love that gave it birth,

The passion to lock itself in and to unite,

It would swallow all into one lonely self,

Devouring the soul that it had made its own,

By suffering and annihilation’s pain

Punishing the unwillingness to be one,

Angry with the refusals of the world,

Passionate to take but knowing not how to give.

Death’s sombre cowl was cast from Nature’s brow;

There lightened on her the godhead’s lurking laugh.

All grace and glory and all divinity

Were here collected in a single form;

All worshipped eyes looked through his from one face;

He bore all godheads in his grandiose limbs.

An oceanic spirit dwelt within;

Intolerant and invincible in joy

A flood of freedom and transcendent bliss

Into immortal lines of beauty rose.

In him the fourfold Being bore its crown

That wears the mystery of a nameless Name,

The universe writing its tremendous sense

In the inexhaustible meaning of a word.

In him the architect of the visible world,

At once the art and artist of his works,

Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,

Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns

And the star-entangled ether is his hold,

Expressed himself with Matter for his speech:

Objects are his letters, forces are his words,

Events are the crowded history of his life,

And sea and land are the pages for his tale.

Matter is his means and his spiritual sign;

He hangs the thought upon a lash’s lift,

In the current of the blood makes flow the soul.

His is the dumb will of atom and of clod;

A Will that without sense or motive acts,

An Intelligence needing not to think or plan,

The world creates itself invincibly;

For its body is the body of the Lord

And in its heart stands Virat, King of Kings.

In him shadows his form the Golden Child

Who in the Sun-capped Vast cradles his birth:

Hiranyagarbha, author of thoughts and dreams,

Who sees the invisible and hears the sounds

That never visited a mortal ear,

Discoverer of unthought realities

Truer to Truth than all we have ever known,

He is the leader on the inner roads;

A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms;

A magician with the omnipotent wand of thought,

He builds the secret uncreated worlds.

Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye,

His is the vision and the prophecy:

Imagist casting the formless into shape,

Traveller and hewer of the unseen paths,

He is the carrier of the hidden fire,

He is the voice of the Ineffable,

He is the invisible hunter of the light,

The Angel of mysterious ecstasies,

The conqueror of the kingdoms of the soul.

A third spirit stood behind, their hidden cause,

A mass of superconscience closed in light,

Creator of things in his all-knowing sleep.

All from his stillness came as grows a tree;

He is our seed and core, our head and base.

All light is but a flash from his closed eyes:

An all-wise Truth is mystic in his heart,

The omniscient Ray is shut behind his lids:

He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought,

His wordless silence brings the immortal word.

He sleeps in the atom and the burning star,

He sleeps in man and god and beast and stone:

Because he is there the Inconscient does its work,

Because he is there the world forgets to die.

He is the centre of the circle of God,

He the circumference of Nature’s run.

His slumber is an Almightiness in things,

Awake, he is the Eternal and Supreme.

Above was the brooding bliss of the Infinite,

Its omniscient and omnipotent repose,

Its immobile silence absolute and alone.

All powers were woven in countless concords here.

The bliss that made the world in his body lived,

Love and delight were the head of the sweet form.

In the alluring meshes of their snare

Recaptured, the proud blissful members held

All joys outrunners of the panting heart

And fugitive from life’s outstripped desire.

Whatever vision has escaped the eye,

Whatever happiness comes in dream and trance,

The nectar spilled by love with trembling hands,

The joy the cup of Nature cannot hold,

Had crowded to the beauty of his face,

Were waiting in the honey of his laugh.

Things hidden by the silence of the hours,

The ideas that find no voice on living lips,

The soul’s pregnant meeting with infinity

Had come to birth in him and taken fire:

The secret whisper of the flower and star

Revealed its meaning in his fathomless look.

His lips curved eloquent like a rose of dawn;

His smile that played with the wonder of the mind

And stayed in the heart when it had left his mouth

Glimmered with the radiance of the morning star

Gemming the wide discovery of heaven.

His gaze was the regard of eternity;

The spirit of its sweet and calm intent

Was a wise home of gladness and divulged

The light of the ages in the mirth of the hours,

A sun of wisdom in a miracled grove.

In the orchestral largeness of his mind

All contrary seekings their close kinship knew,

Rich-hearted, wonderful to each other met

In the mutual marvelling of their myriad notes

And dwelt like brothers of one family

Who had found their common and mysterious home.

As from the harp of some ecstatic god

There springs a harmony of lyric bliss

Striving to leave no heavenly joy unsung,

Such was the life in that embodied Light.

He seemed the wideness of a boundless sky,

He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth,

He seemed the burning of a world-wide sun.

Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul.

Then like an anthem from the heart’s lucent cave

A voice soared up whose magic sound could turn

The poignant weeping of the earth to sobs

Of rapture and her cry to spirit song.

“O human image of the deathless word,

How hast thou seen beyond the topaz walls

The gleaming sisters of the divine gate,

Summoned the genii of their wakeful sleep,

And under revelation’s arches forced

The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,

Unlocked the avenues of spiritual sight

And taught the entries of a heavenlier state

To thy rapt soul that bore the golden key?

In thee the secret sight man’s blindness missed

Has opened its view past Time, my chariot-course,

And death, my tunnel which I drive through life

To reach my unseen distances of bliss.

I am the hushed search of the jealous gods

Pursuing my wisdom’s vast mysterious work

Seized in the thousand meeting ways of heaven.

I am the beauty of the unveiled ray

Drawing through the deep roads of the infinite night

The unconquerable pilgrim soul of earth

Beneath the flaring torches of the stars.

I am the inviolable Ecstasy;

They who have looked on me, shall grieve no more.

The eyes that live in night shall see my form.

On the pale shores of foaming steely straits

That flow beneath a grey tormented sky,

Two powers from one original ecstasy born

Pace near but parted in the life of man;

One leans to earth, the other yearns to the skies:

Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth,

Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven.

The two longing to join, yet walk apart,

Idly divided by their vain conceits;

They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears;

Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought,

They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep.

Or side by side reclined upon my vasts

Like bride and bridegroom magically divorced

They wake to yearn, but never can they clasp

While thinly flickering hesitates uncrossed

Between the lovers on their nuptial couch

The shadowy eidolon of a sword.

But when the phantom flame-edge fails undone,

Then never more can space or time divide

The lover from the loved; Space shall draw back

Her great translucent curtain, Time shall be

The quivering of the spirit’s endless bliss.

Attend that moment of celestial fate.

Meanwhile you two shall serve the dual law

Which only now the scouts of vision glimpse

Who pressing through the forest of their thoughts

Have found the narrow bridges of the gods.

Wait patient of the brittle bars of form

Making division your delightful means

Of happy oneness rapturously enhanced

By attraction in the throbbing air between.

Yet if thou wouldst abandon the vexed world,

Careless of the dark moan of things below,

Tread down the isthmus, overleap the flood,

Cancel thy contract with the labouring Force;

Renounce the tie that joins thee to earth-kind,

Cast off thy sympathy with mortal hearts.

Arise, vindicate thy spirit’s conquered right:

Relinquishing thy charge of transient breath,

Under the cold gaze of the indifferent stars

Leaving thy borrowed body on the sod,

Ascend, O soul, into thy blissful home.

Here in the playground of the eternal Child

Or in domains the wise Immortals tread

Roam with thy comrade splendour under skies

Spiritual lit by an unsetting sun,

As godheads live who care not for the world

And share not in the toil of Nature’s powers:

Absorbed in their self-ecstasy they dwell.

Cast off the ambiguous myth of earth’s desire,

O immortal, to felicity arise.”

On Savitri listening in her tranquil heart

To the harmony of the ensnaring voice

A joy exceeding earth’s and heaven’s poured down,

The bliss of an unknown eternity,

A rapture from some waiting Infinite.

A smile came rippling out in her wide eyes,

Its confident felicity’s messenger

As if the first beam of the morning sun

Rippled along two wakened lotus-pools.

“O besetter of man’s soul with life and death

And the world’s pleasure and pain and Day and Night,

Tempting his heart with the far lure of heaven,

Testing his strength with the close touch of hell,

I climb not to thy everlasting Day,

Even as I have shunned thy eternal Night.

To me who turn not from thy terrestrial Way,

Give back the other self my nature asks.

Thy spaces need him not to help their joy;

Earth needs his beautiful spirit made by thee

To fling delight down like a net of gold.

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield,

The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,

Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.

The heavens were once to me my natural home,

I too have wandered in star-jewelled groves,

Paced sun-gold pastures and moon-silver swards

And heard the harping laughter of their streams

And lingered under branches dropping myrrh;

I too have revelled in the fields of light

Touched by the ethereal raiment of the winds,

Thy wonder-rounds of music I have trod,

Lived in the rhyme of bright unlabouring thoughts,

I have beat swift harmonies of rapture vast,

Danced in spontaneous measures of the soul

The great and easy dances of the gods.

O fragrant are the lanes thy children walk

And lovely is the memory of their feet

Amid the wonder-flowers of Paradise:

A heavier tread is mine, a mightier touch.

There where the gods and demons battle in night

Or wrestle on the borders of the Sun,

Taught by the sweetness and the pain of life

To bear the uneven strenuous beat that throbs

Against the edge of some divinest hope,

To dare the impossible with these pangs of search,

In me the spirit of immortal love

Stretches its arms out to embrace mankind.

Too far thy heavens for me from suffering men.

Imperfect is the joy not shared by all.

O to spread forth, O to encircle and seize

More hearts till love in us has filled thy world!

O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars!

For victory in the tournament with death,

For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,

For flashing of the splendid sword of God!

O thou who soundst the trumpet in the lists,

Part not the handle from the untried steel,

Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.

Are there not still a million fights to wage?

O king-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,

Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.

Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,

Thy blade’s exultant smile name Satyavan.

Fashion to beauty, point us through the world.

Break not the lyre before the song is found;

Are there not still unnumbered chants to weave?

O subtle-souled musician of the years,

Play out what thou hast fluted on my stops;

Arise from the strain their first wild plaint divined

And that discover which is yet unsung.

I know that I can lift man’s soul to God,

I know that he can bring the Immortal down.

Our will labours permitted by thy will

And without thee an empty roar of storm,

A senseless whirlwind is the Titan’s force

And without thee a snare the strength of gods.

Let not the inconscient gulf swallow man’s race

That through earth’s ignorance struggles towards thy Light.

O Thunderer with the lightnings of the soul,

Give not to darkness and to death thy sun,

Achieve thy wisdom’s hidden firm decree

And the mandate of thy secret world-wide love.”

Her words failed lost in thought’s immensities

Which seized them at the limits of their cry

And hid their meaning in the distances

That stir to more than ever speech has won

From the Unthinkable, end of all our thought,

And the Ineffable from whom all words come.

Then with a smile august as noonday heavens

The godhead of the vision wonderful:

“How shall earth-nature and man’s nature rise

To the celestial levels, yet earth abide?

Heaven and earth towards each other gaze

Across a gulf that few can cross, none touch,

Arriving through a vague ethereal mist

Out of which all things form that move in space,

The shore that all can see but never reach.

Heaven’s light visits sometimes the mind of earth;

Its thoughts burn in her sky like lonely stars;

In her heart there move celestial seekings soft

And beautiful like fluttering wings of birds,

Visions of joy that she can never win

Traverse the fading mirror of her dreams.

Faint seeds of light and bliss bear sorrowful flowers,

Faint harmonies caught from a half-heard song

Fall swooning mid the wandering voices’ jar,

Foam from the tossing luminous seas where dwells

The beautiful and far delight of gods,

Raptures unknown, a miracled happiness

Thrill her and pass half-shaped to mind and sense.

Above her little finite steps she feels,

Careless of knot or pause, worlds which weave out

A strange perfection beyond law and rule,

A universe of self-found felicity,

An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats,

The many-movemented heart-beats of the One,

Magic of the boundless harmonies of self,

Order of the freedom of the infinite,

The wonder-plastics of the Absolute.

There is the All-Truth and there the timeless bliss.

But hers are fragments of a star-lost gleam,

Hers are but careless visits of the gods.

They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed

And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.

There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.

A few can climb to an unperishing sun,

Or live on the edges of the mystic moon

And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray.

The heroes and the demigods are few

To whom the close immortal voices speak

And to their acts the heavenly clan are near.

Few are the silences in which Truth is heard,

Unveiling the timeless utterance in her deeps;

Few are the splendid moments of the seers.

Heaven’s call is rare, rarer the heart that heeds;

The doors of light are sealed to common mind

And earth’s needs nail to earth the human mass,

Only in an uplifting hour of stress

Men answer to the touch of greater things:

Or, raised by some strong hand to breathe heaven-air,

They slide back to the mud from which they climbed;

In the mud of which they are made, whose law they know

They joy in safe return to a friendly base,

And, though something in them weeps for glory lost

And greatness murdered, they accept their fall.

To be the common man they think the best,

To live as others live is their delight.

For most are built on Nature’s early plan

And owe small debt to a superior plane;

The human average is their level pitch,

A thinking animal’s material range.

In the long ever-mounting hierarchy,

In the stark economy of cosmic life

Each creature to its appointed task and place

Is bound by his nature’s form, his spirit’s force.

If this were easily disturbed, it would break

The settled balance of created things;

The perpetual order of the universe

Would tremble, and a gap yawn in woven Fate.

If men were not and all were brilliant gods,

The mediating stair would then be lost

By which the spirit awake in Matter winds

Accepting the circuits of the middle Way,

By heavy toil and slow aeonic steps

Reaching the bright miraculous fringe of God,

Into the glory of the Oversoul.

My will, my call is there in men and things;

But the Inconscient lies at the world’s grey back

And draws to its breast of Night and Death and Sleep.

Imprisoned in its dark and dumb abyss

A little consciousness it lets escape

But jealous of the growing light holds back

Close to the obscure edges of its cave

As if a fond ignorant mother kept her child

Tied to her apron strings of Nescience.

The Inconscient could not read without man’s mind

The mystery of the world its sleep has made:

Man is its key to unlock a conscious door.

But still it holds him dangled in its grasp:

It draws its giant circle round his thoughts,

It shuts his heart to the supernal Light.

A high and dazzling limit shines above,

A black and blinding border rules below:

His mind is closed between two firmaments.

He seeks through words and images the Truth,

And, poring on surfaces and brute outsides

Or dipping cautious feet in shallow seas,

Even his Knowledge is an Ignorance.

He is barred out from his own inner depths;

He cannot look on the face of the Unknown.

How shall he see with the Omniscient’s eyes,

How shall he will with the Omnipotent’s force?

O too compassionate and eager Dawn,

Leave to the circling aeons’ tardy pace

And to the working of the inconscient Will,

Leave to its imperfect light the earthly race:

All shall be done by the long act of Time.

Although the race is bound by its own kind,

The soul in man is greater than his fate:

Above the wash and surge of Time and Space,

Disengaging from the cosmic commonalty

By which all life is kin in grief and joy,

Delivered from the universal Law

The sunlike single and transcendent spirit

Can blaze its way through the mind’s barrier wall

And burn alone in the eternal sky,

Inhabitant of a wide and endless calm.

O flame, withdraw into thy luminous self.

Or else return to thy original might

On a seer-summit above thought and world;

Partner of my unhoured eternity,

Be one with the infinity of my power:

For thou art the World-Mother and the Bride.

Out of the fruitless yearning of earth’s life,

Out of her feeble unconvincing dream,

Recovering wings that cross infinity

Pass back into the Power from which thou cam’st.

To that thou canst uplift thy formless flight,

Thy heart can rise from its unsatisfied beats

And feel the immortal and spiritual joy

Of a soul that never lost felicity.

Lift up the fallen heart of love which flutters

Cast down desire’s abyss into the gulfs.

For ever rescued out of Nature’s shapes

Discover what the aimless cycles want,

There intertwined with all thy life has meant,

Here vainly sought in a terrestrial form.

Break into eternity thy mortal mould;

Melt, lightning, into thy invisible flame!

Clasp, Ocean, deep into thyself thy wave,

Happy for ever in the embosoming surge.

Grow one with the still passion of the depths.

Then shalt thou know the Lover and the Loved,

Leaving the limits dividing him and thee.

Receive him into boundless Savitri,

Lose thyself into infinite Satyavan.

O miracle, where thou beganst, there cease!”

But Savitri answered to the radiant God:

“In vain thou temptst with solitary bliss

Two spirits saved out of a suffering world;

My soul and his indissolubly linked

In the one task for which our lives were born,

To raise the world to God in deathless Light,

To bring God down to the world on earth we came,

To change the earthly life to life divine.

I keep my will to save the world and man;

Even the charm of thy alluring voice,

O blissful Godhead, cannot seize and snare.

I sacrifice not earth to happier worlds.

Because there dwelt the Eternal’s vast Idea

And his dynamic will in men and things,

So only could the enormous scene begin.

Whence came this profitless wilderness of stars,

This mighty barren wheeling of the suns?

Who made the soul of futile life in Time,

Planted a purpose and a hope in the heart,

Set Nature to a huge and meaningless task

Or planned her million-aeoned effort’s waste?

What force condemned to birth and death and tears

These conscious creatures crawling on the globe?

If earth can look up to the light of heaven

And hear an answer to her lonely cry,

Not vain their meeting, nor heaven’s touch a snare.

If thou and I are true, the world is true;

Although thou hide thyself behind thy works,

To be is not a senseless paradox;

Since God has made earth, earth must make in her God;

What hides within her breast she must reveal.

I claim thee for the world that thou hast made.

If man lives bound by his humanity,

If he is tied for ever to his pain,

Let a greater being then arise from man,

The superhuman with the Eternal mate

And the Immortal shine through earthly forms.

Else were creation vain and this great world

A nothing that in Time’s moments seems to be.

But I have seen through the insentient mask;

I have felt a secret spirit stir in things

Carrying the body of the growing God:

It looks through veiling forms at veilless truth;

It pushes back the curtain of the gods;

It climbs towards its own eternity.”

But the god answered to the woman’s heart:

“O living power of the incarnate Word,

All that the Spirit has dreamed thou canst create:

Thou art the force by which I made the worlds,

Thou art my vision and my will and voice.

But knowledge too is thine, the world-plan thou knowest

And the tardy process of the pace of Time.

In the impetuous drive of thy heart of flame,

In thy passion to deliver man and earth,

Indignant at the impediments of Time

And the slow evolution’s sluggard steps,

Lead not the spirit in an ignorant world

To dare too soon the adventure of the Light,

Pushing the bound and slumbering god in man

Awakened mid the ineffable silences

Into endless vistas of the unknown and unseen,

Across the last confines of the limiting Mind

And the Superconscient’s perilous border line

Into the danger of the Infinite.

But if thou wilt not wait for Time and God,

Do then thy work and force thy will on Fate.

As I have taken from thee my load of night

And taken from thee my twilight’s doubts and dreams,

So now I take my light of utter Day.

These are my symbol kingdoms but not here

Can the great choice be made that fixes fate

Or uttered the sanction of the Voice supreme.

Arise upon a ladder of greater worlds

To the infinity where no world can be.

But not in the wide air where a greater Life

Uplifts its mystery and its miracle,

And not on the luminous peaks of summit Mind,

Or in the hold where subtle Matter’s spirit

Hides in its light of shimmering secrecies,

Can there be heard the Eternal’s firm command

That joins the head of destiny to its base.

These only are the mediating links;

Not theirs is the originating sight

Nor the fulfilling act or last support

That bears perpetually the cosmic pile.

Two are the Powers that hold the ends of Time;

Spirit foresees, Matter unfolds its thought,

The dumb executor of God’s decrees,

Omitting no iota and no dot,

Agent unquestioning, inconscient, stark,

Evolving inevitably a charged content,

Intention of his force in Time and Space,

In animate beings and inanimate things;

Immutably it fulfils its ordered task,

It cancels not a tittle of things done;

Unswerving from the oracular command

It alters not the steps of the Unseen.

If thou must indeed deliver man and earth

On the spiritual heights look down on life,

Discover the truth of God and man and world;

Then do thy task knowing and seeing all.

Ascend, O soul, into thy timeless self;

Choose destiny’s curve and stamp thy will on Time.”

He ended and upon the falling sound

A power went forth that shook the founded spheres

And loosed the stakes that hold the tents of form.

Absolved from vision’s grip and the folds of thought,

Rapt from her sense like disappearing scenes

In the stupendous theatre of Space

The heaven-worlds vanished in spiritual light.

A movement was abroad, a cry, a word,

Beginningless in its vast discovery,

Momentless in its unthinkable return:

Choired in calm seas she heard the eternal Thought

Rhythming itself abroad unutterably

In spaceless orbits and on timeless roads.

In an ineffable world she lived fulfilled.

An energy of the triune Infinite,

In a measureless Reality she dwelt,

A rapture and a being and a force,

A linked and myriad-motioned plenitude,

A virgin unity, a luminous spouse,

Housing a multitudinous embrace

To marry all in God’s immense delight,

Bearing the eternity of every spirit,

Bearing the burden of universal love,

A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.

All things she knew, all things imagined or willed:

Her ear was opened to ideal sound,

Shape the convention bound no more her sight,

A thousand doors of oneness was her heart.

A crypt and sanctuary of brooding light

Appeared, the last recess of things beyond.

Then in its rounds the enormous fiat paused,

Silence gave back to the Unknowable

All it had given. Still was her listening thought.

The form of things had ceased within her soul.

Invisible that perfect godhead now.

Around her some tremendous spirit lived,

Mysterious flame around a melting pearl,

And in the phantom of abolished Space

There was a voice unheard by ears that cried:

“Choose, spirit, thy supreme choice not given again;

For now from my highest being looks at thee

The nameless formless peace where all things rest.

In a happy vast sublime cessation know, –

An immense extinction in eternity,

A point that disappears in the infinite, –

Felicity of the extinguished flame,

Last sinking of a wave in a boundless sea,

End of the trouble of thy wandering thoughts,

Close of the journeying of thy pilgrim soul.

Accept, O music, weariness of thy notes,

O stream, wide breaking of thy channel banks.”

The moments fell into eternity.

But someone yearned within a bosom unknown

And silently the woman’s heart replied:

“Thy peace, O Lord, a boon within to keep

Amid the roar and ruin of wild Time

For the magnificent soul of man on earth.

Thy calm, O Lord, that bears thy hands of joy.”

Limitless like ocean round a lonely isle

A second time the eternal cry arose:

“Wide open are the ineffable gates in front.

My spirit leans down to break the knot of earth,

Amorous of oneness without thought or sign

To cast down wall and fence, to strip heaven bare,

See with the large eye of infinity,

Unweave the stars and into silence pass.”

In an immense and world-destroying pause

She heard a million creatures cry to her.

Through the tremendous stillness of her thoughts

Immeasurably the woman’s nature spoke:

“Thy oneness, Lord, in many approaching hearts,

My sweet infinity of thy numberless souls.”

Mightily retreating like a sea in ebb

A third time swelled the great admonishing call:

“I spread abroad the refuge of my wings.

Out of its incommunicable deeps

My power looks forth of mightiest splendour, stilled

Into its majesty of sleep, withdrawn

Above the dreadful whirlings of the world.”

A sob of things was answer to the voice,

And passionately the woman’s heart replied:

“Thy energy, Lord, to seize on woman and man,

To take all things and creatures in their grief

And gather them into a mother’s arms.”

Solemn and distant like a seraph’s lyre

A last great time the warning sound was heard:

“I open the wide eye of solitude

To uncover the voiceless rapture of my bliss,

Where in a pure and exquisite hush it lies

Motionless in its slumber of ecstasy,

Resting from the sweet madness of the dance

Out of whose beat the throb of hearts was born.”

Breaking the Silence with appeal and cry

A hymn of adoration tireless climbed,

A music beat of winged uniting souls,

Then all the woman yearningly replied:

“Thy embrace which rends the living knot of pain,

Thy joy, O Lord, in which all creatures breathe,

Thy magic flowing waters of deep love,

Thy sweetness give to me for earth and men.”

Then after silence a still blissful cry

Began, such as arose from the Infinite

When the first whisperings of a strange delight

Imagined in its deep the joy to seek,

The passion to discover and to touch,

The enamoured laugh which rhymed the chanting worlds:

“O beautiful body of the incarnate Word,

Thy thoughts are mine, I have spoken with thy voice.

My will is thine, what thou hast chosen I choose:

All thou hast asked I give to earth and men.

All shall be written out in destiny’s book

By my trustee of thought and plan and act,

The executor of my will, eternal Time.

But since thou hast refused my maimless Calm

And turned from my termless peace in which is expunged

The visage of Space and the shape of Time is lost,

And from happy extinction of thy separate self

In my uncompanioned lone eternity, –

For not for thee the nameless worldless Nought,

Annihilation of thy living soul

And the end of thought and hope and life and love

In the blank measureless Unknowable, –

I lay my hands upon thy soul of flame,

I lay my hands upon thy heart of love,

I yoke thee to my power of work in Time.

Because thou hast obeyed my timeless will,

Because thou hast chosen to share earth’s struggle and fate

And leaned in pity over earth-bound men

And turned aside to help and yearned to save,

I bind by thy heart’s passion thy heart to mine

And lay my splendid yoke upon thy soul.

Now will I do in thee my marvellous works.

I will fasten thy nature with my cords of strength,

Subdue to my delight thy spirit’s limbs

And make thee a vivid knot of all my bliss

And build in thee my proud and crystal home.

Thy days shall be my shafts of power and light,

Thy nights my starry mysteries of joy

And all my clouds lie tangled in thy hair

And all my springtides marry in thy mouth.

O Sun-Word, thou shalt raise the earth-soul to Light

And bring down God into the lives of men;

Earth shall be my work-chamber and my house,

My garden of life to plant a seed divine.

When all thy work in human time is done

The mind of earth shall be a home of light,

The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,

The body of earth a tabernacle of God.

Awakened from the mortal’s ignorance

Men shall be lit with the Eternal’s ray

And the glory of my sun-lift in their thoughts

And feel in their hearts the sweetness of my love

And in their acts my Power’s miraculous drive.

My will shall be the meaning of their days;

Living for me, by me, in me they shall live.

In the heart of my creation’s mystery

I will enact the drama of thy soul,

Inscribe the long romance of Thee and Me.

I will pursue thee across the centuries;

Thou shalt be hunted through the world by love,

Naked of ignorance’ protecting veil

And without covert from my radiant gods.

No shape shall screen thee from my divine desire,

Nowhere shalt thou escape my living eyes.

In the nudity of thy discovered self,

In a bare identity with all that is,

Disrobed of thy covering of humanity,

Divested of the dense veil of human thought,

Made one with every mind and body and heart,

Made one with all Nature and with Self and God,

Summing in thy single soul my mystic world

I will possess in thee my universe,

The universe find all I am in thee.

Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change,

Thou shalt fill all with my splendour and my bliss,

Thou shalt meet all with thy transmuting soul.

Assailed by my infinitudes above,

And quivering in immensities below,

Pursued by me through my mind’s wall-less vast,

Oceanic with the surges of my life,

A swimmer lost between two leaping seas

By my outer pains and inner sweetnesses

Finding my joy in my opposite mysteries

Thou shalt respond to me from every nerve.

A vision shall compel thy coursing breath,

Thy heart shall drive thee on the wheel of works,

Thy mind shall urge thee through the flames of thought,

To meet me in the abyss and on the heights,

To feel me in the tempest and the calm,

And love me in the noble and the vile,

In beautiful things and terrible desire.

The pains of hell shall be to thee my kiss,

The flowers of heaven persuade thee with my touch.

My fiercest masks shall my attractions bring.

Music shall find thee in the voice of swords,

Beauty pursue thee through the core of flame.

Thou shalt know me in the rolling of the spheres

And cross me in the atoms of the whirl.

The wheeling forces of my universe

Shall cry to thee the summons of my name.

Delight shall drop down from my nectarous moon,

My fragrance seize thee in the jasmine’s snare,

My eye shall look upon thee from the sun.

Mirror of Nature’s secret spirit made,

Thou shalt reflect my hidden heart of joy,

Thou shalt drink down my sweetness unalloyed

In my pure lotus-cup of starry brim.

My dreadful hands laid on thy bosom shall force

Thy being bathed in fiercest longing’s streams.

Thou shalt discover the one and quivering note,

And cry, the harp of all my melodies,

And roll, my foaming wave in seas of love.

Even my disasters’ clutch shall be to thee

The ordeal of my rapture’s contrary shape:

In pain’s self shall smile on thee my secret face:

Thou shalt bear my ruthless beauty unabridged

Amid the world’s intolerable wrongs,

Trampled by the violent misdeeds of Time

Cry out to the ecstasy of my rapture’s touch.

All beings shall be to thy life my emissaries;

Drawn to me on the bosom of thy friend,

Compelled to meet me in thy enemy’s eyes,

My creatures shall demand me from thy heart.

Thou shalt not shrink from any brother soul.

Thou shalt be attracted helplessly to all.

Men seeing thee shall feel my hands of joy,

In sorrow’s pangs feel steps of the world’s delight,

Their life experience its tumultuous shock

In the mutual craving of two opposites.

Hearts touched by thy love shall answer to my call,

Discover the ancient music of the spheres

In the revealing accents of thy voice

And nearer draw to me because thou art:

Enamoured of thy spirit’s loveliness

They shall embrace my body in thy soul,

Hear in thy life the beauty of my laugh,

Know the thrilled bliss with which I made the worlds.

All that thou hast, shall be for others’ bliss,

All that thou art, shall to my hands belong.

I will pour delight from thee as from a jar,

I will whirl thee as my chariot through the ways,

I will use thee as my sword and as my lyre,

I will play on thee my minstrelsies of thought.

And when thou art vibrant with all ecstasy,

And when thou liv’st one spirit with all things,

Then will I spare thee not my living fires,

But make thee a channel for my timeless force.

My hidden presence led thee unknowing on

From thy beginning in earth’s voiceless bosom

Through life and pain and time and will and death,

Through outer shocks and inner silences

Along the mystic roads of Space and Time

To the experience which all Nature hides.

Who hunts and seizes me, my captive grows:

This shalt thou henceforth learn from thy heart-beats.

For ever love, O beautiful slave of God!

O lasso of my rapture’s widening noose,

Become my cord of universal love.

The spirit ensnared by thee force to delight

Of creation’s oneness sweet and fathomless,

Compelled to embrace my myriad unities

And all my endless forms and divine souls.

O Mind, grow full of the eternal peace;

O Word, cry out the immortal litany:

Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born.

“Descend to life with him thy heart desires.

O Satyavan, O luminous Savitri,

I sent you forth of old beneath the stars,

A dual power of God in an ignorant world,

In a hedged creation shut from limitless self,

Bringing down God to the insentient globe,

Lifting earth-beings to immortality.

In the world of my knowledge and my ignorance

Where God is unseen and only is heard a Name

And knowledge is trapped in the boundaries of mind

And life is hauled in the drag-net of desire

And Matter hides the soul from its own sight,

You are my Force at work to uplift earth’s fate,

My self that moves up the immense incline

Between the extremes of the spirit’s night and day.

He is my soul that climbs from nescient Night

Through life and mind and supernature’s Vast

To the supernal light of Timelessness

And my eternity hid in moving Time

And my boundlessness cut by the curve of Space.

It climbs to the greatness it has left behind

And to the beauty and joy from which it fell,

To the closeness and sweetness of all things divine,

To light without bounds and life illimitable,

Taste of the depths of the Ineffable’s bliss,

Touch of the immortal and the infinite.

He is my soul that gropes out of the beast

To reach humanity’s heights of lucent thought

And the vicinity of Truth’s sublime.

He is the godhead growing in human lives

And in the body of earth-being’s forms:

He is the soul of man climbing to God

In Nature’s surge out of earth’s ignorance.

O Savitri, thou art my spirit’s Power,

The revealing voice of my immortal Word,

The face of Truth upon the roads of Time

Pointing to the souls of men the routes to God.

While the dim light from the veiled Spirit’s peak

Falls upon Matter’s stark inconscient sleep

As if a pale moonbeam on a dense glade,

And Mind in a half-light moves amid half-truths

And the human heart knows only human love

And life is a stumbling and imperfect force

And the body counts out its precarious days,

You shall be born into man’s dubious hours

In forms that hide the soul’s divinity

And show through veils of the earth’s doubting air

My glory breaking as through clouds a sun,

Or burning like a rare and inward fire,

And with my nameless influence fill men’s lives.

Yet shall they look up as to peaks of God

And feel God like a circumambient air

And rest on God as on a motionless base.

Yet shall there glow on mind like a horned moon

The Spirit’s crescent splendour in pale skies

And light man’s life upon his Godward road.

But more there is concealed in God’s Beyond

That shall one day reveal its hidden face.

Now mind is all and its uncertain ray,

Mind is the leader of the body and life,

Mind the thought-driven chariot of the soul

Carrying the luminous wanderer in the night

To vistas of a far uncertain dawn,

To the end of the Spirit’s fathomless desire,

To its dream of absolute truth and utter bliss.

There are greater destinies mind cannot surmise

Fixed on the summit of the evolving Path

The Traveller now treads in the Ignorance,

Unaware of his next step, not knowing his goal.

Mind is not all his tireless climb can reach,

There is a fire on the apex of the worlds,

There is a house of the Eternal’s light,

There is an infinite truth, an absolute power.

The Spirit’s mightiness shall cast off its mask;

Its greatness shall be felt shaping the world’s course:

It shall be seen in its own veilless beams,

A star rising from the Inconscient’s night,

A sun climbing to Supernature’s peak.

Abandoning the dubious middle Way,

A few shall glimpse the miraculous Origin

And some shall feel in you the secret Force

And they shall turn to meet a nameless tread,

Adventurers into a mightier Day.

Ascending out of the limiting breadths of mind,

They shall discover the world’s huge design

And step into the Truth, the Right, the Vast.

You shall reveal to them the hidden eternities,

The breath of infinitudes not yet revealed,

Some rapture of the bliss that made the world,

Some rush of the force of God’s omnipotence,

Some beam of the omniscient Mystery.

But when the hour of the Divine draws near

The Mighty Mother shall take birth in Time

And God be born into the human clay

In forms made ready by your human lives.

Then shall the Truth supreme be given to men:

There is a being beyond the being of mind,

An Immeasurable cast into many forms,

A miracle of the multitudinous One,

There is a consciousness mind cannot touch,

Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.

It has no home on earth, no centre in man,

Yet is the source of all things thought and done,

The fount of the creation and its works,

It is the origin of all truth here,

The sun-orb of mind’s fragmentary rays,

Infinity’s heaven that spills the rain of God,

The Immense that calls to man to expand the Spirit,

The wide Aim that justifies his narrow attempts,

A channel for the little he tastes of bliss.

Some shall be made the glory’s receptacles

And vehicles of the Eternal’s luminous power.

These are the high forerunners, the heads of Time,

The great deliverers of earth-bound mind,

The high transfigurers of human clay,

The first-born of a new supernal race.

The incarnate dual Power shall open God’s door,

Eternal supermind touch earthly Time.

The superman shall wake in mortal man

And manifest the hidden demigod

Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force

Revealing the secret deity in the cave.

Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme,

His bright unveiled Transcendence shall illumine

The mind and heart and force the life and act

To interpret his inexpressible mystery

In a heavenly alphabet of Divinity’s signs.

His living cosmic spirit shall enring,

Annulling the decree of death and pain,

Erasing the formulas of the Ignorance,

With the deep meaning of beauty and life’s hid sense,

The being ready for immortality,

His regard crossing infinity’s mystic waves

Bring back to Nature her early joy to live,

The metred heart-beats of a lost delight,

The cry of a forgotten ecstasy,

The dance of the first world-creating Bliss.

The Immanent shall be the witness God

Watching on his many-petalled lotus-throne

His actionless being and his silent might

Ruling earth-nature by eternity’s law,

A thinker waking the Inconscient’s world,

An immobile centre of many infinitudes

In his thousand-pillared temple by Time’s sea.

Then shall the embodied being live as one

Who is a thought, a will of the Divine,

A mask or robe of his divinity,

An instrument and partner of his Force,

A point or line drawn in the infinite,

A manifest of the Imperishable.

The supermind shall be his nature’s fount,

The Eternal’s truth shall mould his thoughts and acts,

The Eternal’s truth shall be his light and guide.

All then shall change, a magic order come

Overtopping this mechanical universe.

A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal’s world.

On Nature’s luminous tops, on the Spirit’s ground,

The superman shall reign as king of life,

Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven,

And lead towards God and truth man’s ignorant heart

And lift towards godhead his mortality.

A power released from circumscribing bounds,

Its height pushed up beyond death’s hungry reach,

Life’s tops shall flame with the Immortal’s thoughts,

Light shall invade the darkness of its base.

Then in the process of evolving Time

All shall be drawn into a single plan,

A divine harmony shall be earth’s law,

Beauty and joy remould her way to live:

Even the body shall remember God,

Nature shall draw back from mortality

And Spirit’s fires shall guide the earth’s blind force;

Knowledge shall bring into the aspirant Thought

A high proximity to Truth and God.

The supermind shall claim the world for Light

And thrill with love of God the enamoured heart

And place Light’s crown on Nature’s lifted head

And found Light’s reign on her unshaking base.

A greater truth than earth’s shall roof-in earth

And shed its sunlight on the roads of mind;

A power infallible shall lead the thought,

A seeing Puissance govern life and act,

In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal’s fire.

A soul shall wake in the Inconscient’s house;

The mind shall be God-vision’s tabernacle,

The body intuition’s instrument,

And life a channel for God’s visible power.

All earth shall be the Spirit’s manifest home,

Hidden no more by the body and the life,

Hidden no more by the mind’s ignorance;

An unerring Hand shall shape event and act.

The Spirit’s eyes shall look through Nature’s eyes,

The Spirit’s force shall occupy Nature’s force.

This world shall be God’s visible garden-house,

The earth shall be a field and camp of God,

Man shall forget consent to mortality

And his embodied frail impermanence.

This universe shall unseal its occult sense,

Creation’s process change its antique front,

An ignorant evolution’s hierarchy

Release the Wisdom chained below its base.

The Spirit shall be the master of his world

Lurking no more in form’s obscurity

And Nature shall reverse her action’s rule,

The outward world disclose the Truth it veils;

All things shall manifest the covert God,

All shall reveal the Spirit’s light and might

And move to its destiny of felicity.

Even should a hostile force cling to its reign

And claim its right’s perpetual sovereignty

And man refuse his high spiritual fate,

Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail.

For in the march of all-fulfilling Time

The hour must come of the Transcendent’s will:

All turns and winds towards his predestined ends

In Nature’s fixed inevitable course

Decreed since the beginning of the worlds

In the deep essence of created things:

Even there shall come as a high crown of all

The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.

But first high Truth must set her feet on earth

And man aspire to the Eternal’s light

And all his members feel the Spirit’s touch

And all his life obey an inner Force.

This too shall be; for a new life shall come,

A body of the Superconscient’s truth,

A native field of Supernature’s mights:

It shall make earth’s nescient ground Truth’s colony,

Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe

Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth

And Truth shall be a sun on Nature’s head

And Truth shall be the guide of Nature’s steps

And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps.

When superman is born as Nature’s king

His presence shall transfigure Matter’s world:

He shall light up Truth’s fire in Nature’s night,

He shall lay upon the earth Truth’s greater law;

Man too shall turn towards the Spirit’s call.

Awake to his hidden possibility,

Awake to all that slept within his heart

And all that Nature meant when earth was formed

And the Spirit made this ignorant world his home,

He shall aspire to Truth and God and Bliss.

Interpreter of a diviner law

And instrument of a supreme design,

The higher kind shall lean to lift up man.

Man shall desire to climb to his own heights.

The truth above shall wake a nether truth,

Even the dumb earth become a sentient force.

The Spirit’s tops and Nature’s base shall draw

Near to the secret of their separate truth

And know each other as one deity.

The Spirit shall look out through Matter’s gaze

And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face.

Then man and superman shall be at one

And all the earth become a single life.

Even the multitude shall hear the Voice

And turn to commune with the Spirit within

And strive to obey the high spiritual law:

This earth shall stir with impulses sublime,

Humanity awake to deepest self,

Nature the hidden godhead recognise.

Even the many shall some answer make

And bear the splendour of the Divine’s rush

And his impetuous knock at unseen doors.

A heavenlier passion shall upheave men’s lives,

Their mind shall share in the ineffable gleam,

Their heart shall feel the ecstasy and the fire.

Earth’s bodies shall be conscious of a soul;

Mortality’s bondslaves shall unloose their bonds,

Mere men into spiritual beings grow

And see awake the dumb divinity.

Intuitive beams shall touch the nature’s peaks,

A revelation stir the nature’s depths;

The Truth shall be the leader of their lives,

Truth shall dictate their thought and speech and act,

They shall feel themselves lifted nearer to the sky,

As if a little lower than the gods.

For knowledge shall pour down in radiant streams

And even darkened mind quiver with new life

And kindle and burn with the Ideal’s fire

And turn to escape from mortal ignorance.

The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,

More and more souls shall enter into light,

Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear

And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame

And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight

And human wills tune to the divine will,

These separate selves the Spirit’s oneness feel,

These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,

The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy

And mortal bodies of immortality.

A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And take the charge of breath and speech and act

And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns

And every feeling a celestial thrill.

Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come

Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;

A sudden bliss shall run through every limb

And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.

Thus shall the earth open to divinity

And common natures feel the wide uplift,

Illumine common acts with the Spirit’s ray

And meet the deity in common things.

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

The Spirit shall take up the human play,

This earthly life become the life divine.”

The measure of that subtle music ceased.

Down with a hurried swimming floating lapse

Through unseen worlds and bottomless spaces forced

Sank like a star the soul of Savitri.

Amidst a laughter of unearthly lyres

She heard around her nameless voices cry

Triumphing, an innumerable sound.

A choir of rushing winds to meet her came.

She bore the burden of infinity

And felt the stir of all ethereal space.

Pursuing her in her fall, implacably sweet,

A face was over her which seemed a youth’s,

Symbol of all the beauty eyes see not,

Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue

Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile

Insatiably attracted to delight,

Voluptuous to the embraces of her soul.

Changed in its shape, yet rapturously the same,

It grew a woman’s dark and beautiful

Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds,

A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,

Turbulent in will and terrible in love.

Eyes in which Nature’s blind ecstatic life

Sprang from some spirit’s passionate content,

Missioned her to the whirling dance of earth.

Amidst the headlong rapture of her fall

Held like a bird in a child’s satisfied hands,

In an enamoured grasp her spirit strove

Admitting no release till Time should end,

And, as the fruit of the mysterious joy,

She kept within her strong embosoming soul

Like a flower hidden in the heart of spring

The soul of Satyavan drawn down by her

Inextricably in that mighty lapse.

Invisible heavens in a thronging flight

Soared past her as she fell. Then all the blind

And near attraction of the earth compelled

Fearful rapidities of downward bliss.

Lost in the giddy proneness of that speed,

Whirled, sinking, overcome she disappeared,

Like a leaf spinning from the tree of heaven,

In broad unconsciousness as in a pool;

A hospitable softness drew her in

Into a wonder of miraculous depths,

Above her closed a darkness of great wings

And she was buried in a mother’s breast.

Then from a timeless plane that watches Time,

A Spirit gazed out upon destiny,

In its endless moment saw the ages pass.

All still was in a silence of the gods.

The prophet moment covered limitless Space

And cast into the heart of hurrying Time

A diamond light of the Eternal’s peace,

A crimson seed of God’s felicity;

A glance from the gaze fell of undying Love.

A wonderful face looked out with deathless eyes;

A hand was seen drawing the golden bars

That guard the imperishable secrecies.

A key turned in a mystic lock of Time.

But where the silence of the gods had passed,

A greater harmony from the stillness born

Surprised with joy and sweetness yearning hearts,

An ecstasy and a laughter and a cry.

A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.

Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.

End of Canto One
End of Book Eleven